Archive for the ‘XAML’ Category

I’ve had the good fortune to work on Microsoft Silverlight 1.0, published by Wrox, with a great group of colleagues at Infragistics. We churned this thing out in record time, staying up late, losing sleep, and sacrificing weekends — all while going to our real jobs during the day. For any of you who have written or contributed to a book like this, I’m sure you understand completely. But, the satisfaction that comes at the end of a project like this is totally worth it, and did I mention the book is in FULL COLOR! I’m really excited to see the printed version when it hits store shelves in a few weeks.
For now, you can get more info at the Wrox web site, or pre-order via the Amazon.com listing.

Sometimes an idea strikes and immediately you know it should be forgotten, discarded, but you just can’t help yourself. The Image to XAML converter is the product of just such an idea. I was looking at some bitmap patterns that I use as tiled textures and thought I should just convert them at a pixel level to a XAML representation. THEN I thought I could just convert entire images on a pixel-by-pixel basis to Rectangles in XAML! What a fantastic idea! This little app is a model of what you should not do with XAML, but it’s still entertaining to use. And yes, I’m sure I could make it more efficient using DrawingGroups and RectangleGeometries, but that’s just not the point is it? So, download the app and watch a 16KB png grow to a 1600KB text-based monstrosity.

The wait is officially over! NetAdvantage for WPF 2007.1 is available today and is packed with all kinds of goodness. The suite ships with the xamDataGrid, xamDataPresenter, xamCarouselPanel, xamCarouselListbox, xamDataCarousel and a collection of xamEditors. It’s xamTastic… xamAmazing… xamCreateYourOwnXamAdjective!

These controls (in their various stages) have been featured in Microsoft Keynotes the past three years and were featured in Vista launch events around the country/globe. The xamCarouselPanel-based controls are truly amazing — they allow you to present data along any arbitrary path you can create and provide automatic transition animations. You can define Opacity, Scaling, Skewing and ZOrder effect stops to get an infinite range of visual results.

I’ve released an updated version of the Fireworks to XAML panel along with a new article at the Fireworks Developer Center at adobe.com. The article provides a nice overview of the panel, the features it offers, and how you can tailor the settings to meet your specific needs. The latest version includes a number of bug fixes, support for textures and patterns (ahh yeah!) and replaces the current masking implementation with clipping paths. You can download the latest version from the article posting.

The article is featured in the all new Fireworks Developer Center, updated along with the new CS3 launch. Fireworks CS3 has a ton of great new features that you definitely need to check out. There are lots of great new articles and walkthroughs in both the Developer Center and the Design Center.

I’ve had a few people ask how to use the Reflection control in code-behind instead of purely through xaml, so I decided to post a quick example here. There’s not much to it, but it may not be obvious at first, so…First, create an instance of Reflector (either via XAML or procedurally). Below, I’m creating an instance named ref1. Next, set the ReflectionTarget property to the object you wish to reflect (in my case, a Rectangle named ‘rectangleToReflect’). That’s it! I have a little extra code to set the margin and alignment properties of ref1, then I add it to my outermost Grid, ‘LayoutRoot’.

Are you using the Reflection control in any of your projects? If so, send me a link or a screenshot and I’ll post it here.